Existing User

Ulrike Ottinger's films teeter between fiction and
documentary, and between an attitude of knowing critical distance
and seeming sincerity. At first glance this tension appears to map
neatly onto her career, with the ironic pastiches of the early
Madame X: An Absolute Ruler (1978), Ticket of No
Return (1979) and The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow
Press (1984), followed by the experimental ethnographic styles
of such films as China: The Arts - Everyday Life (1986),
TaigaExile Shanghai (1997).

In his text 'My Last Interview with Ulrike Ottinger: On
Southeast Passage and Beyond', Laurence Rickels notes that
shortly after the release of Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia
(1989) critics hastened to mark a 'before' and 'after' point in
Ottinger's career. But as Rickels implies, this gesture to some
extent belies Ottinger's 'dual - and in every film moment double -
investment in fictional art cinema and documentary
film'.1

Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia seems to occupy the fulcrum
of this binary opposition in Ottinger's oeuvre. Its two-part
structure folds over an internal fulcrum, making the film metonymic
of the oeuvre as a whole. The film's two sections dramatise a clash
not only between cultures, but also between filmmaking styles. The
first hour of the film introduces a motley group of European,
Russian and American travellers aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway.
These characters, like many of their predecessors in Ottinger's
work, seem to typify or allegorise particular imagos and
worldviews. The ilm takes a detour when, in a scene reminiscent of
Joseph von Sternberg's imagos The Shanghai Express (1932),
the train is brought to a halt in the middle of the Gobi desert by
a nomadic tribe of Mongolians

Footnotes

Laurence A. Rickels, 'My Last Interview with Ulrike Ottinger: On
Southeast Passage and Beyond', in Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour
(ed.), Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, Cambridge and London:
The MIT Press, 2004, p.422.↑

For a reading of Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia that situates it in
these terms, see Longfellow, op. cit. For readings of Madame X - An
Absolute Ruler that follow similar lines of argument, see Patricia
White, 'Madame X of the China Seas', Screen, vol.28 no.4, Autumn
1987, pp.80-95; and Sabine Hake, '"And with Favourable Winds They
Sailed Away": Madame X and Femininity', in Sandra Frieden et al.
(ed.), Gender and German Cinema, Volume 1: Gender and
Representation in New German Cinema, Providence and Oxford: Berg
Publishers, 1993, pp.179-88. For readings of Ticket of No Return
that centre on female subjectivity, see Miriam Hansen, 'Visual
Pleasure, Fetishism and the Problem of Feminine/Feminist Discourse:
Ulrike Ottinger's Ticket of No Return', New German Critique, no.31,
Winter 1984, pp.95-108; and Kaja Silverman, 'From the Ideal-Ego to
the Active Gift of Love', The Threshold of the Visible World, New
York: Routledge, 1996, as well as 'Narcissism: The Impossible
Love', in I. M. O'Sickey and I. von Zadow (ed.), Triangulated
Visions. Women in Recent German Film Albany: SUNY Press, 1998. On
Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press, see Roswitha
Mueller, 'The Mirror and the Vamp', New German Critique, no.34,
Winter, 1985, pp.176-93. For a reading of Exile Shanghai that
highlights the significance of a lesbian, feminist perspective, see
Amy Villarejo, 'Archiving the Diaspora: A Lesbian Impression of
Ulrike Ottinger's Exile Shanghai', New German Critique, no.87,
Autumn 2002, pp.157-91.↑

See Katie Trumpener, 'Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia in the Mirror of
Dorian Gray: Ethnographic Recordings and the Aesthetics of the
Market in the Recent Films of Ulrike Ottinger', New German
Critique, no.60, Autumn 1993, pp.77-99; and Kristen Whissel,
'Racialized Spectacle, Exchange Relations, and the Western in
Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia', Screen, vol.37 no.1, Spring 1996,
pp.41-67.↑

Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg,
Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998.↑

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